The Terrace Gardens

Our lower flower gardens, including this terraced garden, love this time of the year and quite honestly, May is when they look their best.   Things get a bit wild and crazy the rest of the year.   We have a lot of iris, with bunches of the wild daisies [leucanthemum] that volunteered and stayed, plus a few poppies.  I like the dark red Beauty of Livermoor poppies the best.  There are peonies to the left of this shot.  

Later in the year, there will be a cloud of nigella and a lot of daylilies with some monarda.  The past few hot dry summers almost wiped out my monardas.  We'll see how they do this year.  In late summer we'll get some blue asters and black eyed susans.   Things change a bit every year. 

Click the pic to blow it up for a better look.

Old Iris

There is an old iris that we see around here.   It's not very showy, but it smells incredible.   We see them around the oldest places.   They were likely shared between neighbors and friends.  We found some when we moved here and then split it and planted it all over the place.   It looks best in a place where it gets a bit of shade so you can see the color. 

The color is sort of a greyed lavender.   It looks sort of cloudy next to the showy modern ones. 

The insides are really spectacular. 

I like the contrast of the soft watercolor fade from purple to yellow next to the fine pencil lines of the dark purple on white.  

Blow up the pic for a really good look inside.

Iris and Daisies

I love this combination of flowers in one of our perennial beds:  Siberian iris, daisies, peonies.  They always remind me of ladies and gents at a white tie and tails event.  

Iris Bog

We have a wet mushy place on our property where the creek comes out from under two ginormous beech trees.   It's a perfect place for siberian iris and mint and a nice swamp rose. 

The iris are blooming now.   It's hard to get a fabulous nature mag type pic because this place has a microclimate all its own.   The iris don't bloom at the same time - even though they're all the same kind.   Weird. 

You can see the clumps of iris and imagine how pretty it would be if they all decided to bloom at one time. 

There are two types of mint growing in the bog - apple mint and peppermint.   I'm betting the bees find it this year.   Mint flowers are lovely.

Old Iris

I mentioned before that we inherited some old flowers when we moved here - forsythia, lilacs, peonies and some iris.    These are the iris.

Their flowers are smallish.   They're a cloudy purple with cloudy yellow contrasts.  On the modern iris scale, they're nothing much to get excited about.   

Until you smell them. 

They smell like distilled heaven.

And on the inside, they're amazing.

[Photos: K2]

What old fashioned flowers do you like?